The Missionary by Jack Wilder Page A

had to give his friend the truth. “I’m worried she got snatched, though.”
    “Snatched by who?”
    “The bad guys.” Stone couldn’t make himself say it. He pulled his pistol from his waistband, ejected the clip and checked the loads, more for something to do than anything   else. It was a familiar action, one that helped him feel more like a Navy SEAL than a helpless church worship leader. “Get the kids home. Get them to the airport tomorrow, and get them home. I’ll find Wren.”
    He shoved the pistol back in his waistband and left the hostel, mind whirling with possibilities, contacts, potential locations, people he could shake down for information.  
    He returned to the alley where his gut told him Wren had been abducted. There weren’t any extra clues, just that one cigarette butt. Some oil on the ground, dripped from an old engine. Stone felt the rage of helplessness bite at him. Where to begin? He was a warrior, not an investigator. Others sniffed out the information. He acted on it.  
    His gaze flicked across the street, landed on an abandoned, shuttered shopfront, graffiti-tagged and piled up with trash. There, almost completely hidden in the piles of trash in one corner, was an old man. He was nothing but a dirty, straggly beard and small, beady eyes lost amidst the newspapers and food wrappers and Coke bottles and plastic bags.  
    Stone felt a fleeting glimmer of hope as he jogged through traffic and crouched in front of the derelict.  
    “You see something happen there?” Stone asked in rough but passable Filipino.
    “See nothing.” The old man spoke Filipino as roughly as Stone. He probably spoke some obscure dialect. He claimed ignorance, but grime-crusted fingers made themselves visible through the trash.  
    “You sure?” He dug a wad of Philippine Pesos from his jeans pocket, stuffed a few bills into the outstretched fingers.
    “A truck. Some men. They take a girl, American, look Filipino.”
    Stone bit back a curse.   He shoved a few more bills into the now-empty hand. “Who take her? You know?”
    The old man shook his head, beard waggling. True terror flashed in his eyes. “Not say. Not say. You look Smokey Mountain. Maybe find her there.”
    Stone peeled yet more pesos from the wad and shoved them at the old man, who only shook his head and refused to take them, burrowing down into the trash. A stump protruded from the garbage, where a foot had once been. “Who was it? Who are they?”
    “Not say! They know.”
    That in itself told Stone several things. First, if an old homeless cripple was afraid of talking about them, then he knew who they were. And if he was afraid of talking about them, they were organized, and brutal. He remembered the briefings before his team had landed in Manila, rumors of informants disappearing. Snitches turning up dead. Sources of information drying up cold, frozen by terror.
    Stone also remembered debriefing interviews with the girls he and his team had rescued at such great cost. They spoke of quick and silent abductions. Needles in the arm, brutal beatings and forced addictions, being sold to the highest bidder into sexual slavery.  
    Something told Stone that his team’s strike had only set back the trafficking ring, hadn’t killed the beast entirely. Organizations like that were hydras, seven heads emerging for every one you cut off.  
    And now they were back, and they had Wren.
    He left the old man cowering in his den of garbage, flagged a passing taxi and named an intersection far across the city. He set out on foot, navigating narrow streets and busy intersections. In the distance, a mountain of trash loomed, a two-story monument of waste covering several acres, wreathed in smoke and fumes. The closer he got, the more looks his presence received. He was a lone white man in a place most residents of Manila avoided. To one side were the tenement apartments the government had built several years ago, which now housed thousands of people who